The left-wing blogosphere is up in arms about the President's invocation of the Taft-Hartley act. Mark Kleiman says:
The left blogosphere has been full of complaint about the President's invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act to re-open the West Coast docks. As Sam Heldman summarizes the situation, the union and the shippers were at loggerheads about job protection in the face of labor-saving technological change. The union started a work-to-rule slowdown to put pressure on management. Management staged a lockout. Eugene Scalia, the Solicitor of Labor (a Bush recess appointee after the Senate made it clear he wouldn't be confirmed) proposed a simple 30-day contract extension, which the union accepted but management rejected.
[Note: Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes that Scalia, in private practice, had represented the Pacific Maritime Association, the shippers' group that staged the lockout. Marshall provides a copy of Scalia's financial disclosure form, on which he lists PMA as a former client. I don't know what the rules are about this, but it doesn't smell right. And it makes it even curiouser that the the union should have accepted, and the PMA rejected, Scalia's proposal. But maybe the PMA knew how the endgame would play out.]
Bush intervened, and got an order ending the lockout for an 80-day cooling-off period and requiring the workers to work at normal pace. [More on the legal aspects of slowdowns from Nathan Newman.. Note that "work-to-rule" simply means sticking to the letter of the existing contract. "Sanctity of contract," anyone?]
It's not hard to see the economic justification for reopening the ports, though whether the lockout truly threatened health and safety, as specified in the statute, is less clear. But can anyone in the right blogosphere come up with either a different statement of the facts or a justification for what appears to be an Administration tilt toward the side that (1) started the work stoppage and (2) rejected the mediator's suggestion for ending it? Why reward stubbornness?
Well, my Dad's organization does collective bargaining, and I've worked on union jobs, and so I've heard a little bit about this. A couple of things spring to mind:
(1) I'm under the impression that it wasn't a "work to rule"; it was a "work to OSHA requirements". OSHA is awfully well intended, but from what I've seen, it's not really possible to actually get work done while fulfilling all of their directives, which are legion, conflicting, and often so vaguely defined that it's hard to tell whether you're in compliance or not. You can make things go awfully slow by, say, demanding that the company take time to measure every step on a staircase to see whether it is 6 feet off the ground and therefore requires fall protection, "accidentally" losing your equipment and trekking back for more, etc. In any slowdown, it isn't the working to rule that's the problem -- it's the endless arguing about what constitutes compliance.
(2) While I'm libertarianish, and therefore in sympathy with the argument that the government shouldn't interfere in private labor disputes, you have to remember that the only reason these yabbos can shut down the job is that the government set up a whole class of rules protecting them from the kind of discipline that you and I face if we decide to, say, lower our productivity by half.
Kleiman talks about the sanctity of the contract, and notes that all they're doing is "workign to rule" -- sticking to the letter of the contract. He doesn't seem to wonder why the unions have a contract which, if enforced, would put the employers out of business. Writing such contracts is hardly standard business practice, at least not among businesses that hope to stick around for any length of time.
Why? Because the NLRB weighs in heavily on the side of the union, giving them monopoly power over the shippers: if they don't sign a contract with the union, they are not legally allowed to sign a contract with anyone else, and have to shut down. If the government's free to violate that "sanctity" in order to help the unions, I don't see any legal or philosophical principal that prevents them from doing so to help the owners as well, other than a political or personal preference for one side over the other. If it weren't for the NLRB, these guys would have been fired and replaced a long time ago -- what they're doing is not brain surgery. I don't have all that much sympathy when, having abused the artificial power conveyed upon them by the government, they see the government step in to limit some of that power's more deleterious effects.
[Abuse? -- ed. Yes, I think slowdowns are abusive. How would you feel if your child's tenured professor decided to only teach 1/3 as much material because he thought he deserved to be paid more? Abuse of his sinecure, no? In general, if you want to know why employers hate unions, imagine how you'd feel if the government legally required you to sign a contract with a certain dry cleaner. Imagine what kind of service you'd get from said dry cleaner. Imagine how you'd feel if the dry cleaner told you you couldn't switch to business casual, because he needed the revenue from your shirts. You too would lie awake nights, plotting ways to knock off your dry cleaner and reclaim your shirts for your own.]
(3) It's fun to cast the PMA as the villain, but none of this addresses the central point, which is that during the slowdown, cargo was stacking up and the PMA was losing a lot of money every day they operated under slowdown conditions. I don't think the government can order a company to operate at a loss, which is what Kleiman seems to be suggesting they should have done -- it's a regulatory taking, and if the government wanted to go to the wall on it, the companies could just file for bankruptcy protection, at which point the union contracts would be null and void. This would not improve the lots of the dockworkers, the owners, or any other citizens.
If we want an extension, we, as taxpayers, could decide that we want to foot the bill for the $80-$160K annual salaries these chaps would be drawing, while doing their personal best to ensure that no cargo moves through the port, thus maximizing the cost not only to the shippers, but also the vast majority of us who consume things that get shipped. Personally, I make a lot -- a lot -- less than that, and I'm not inclined to offer up more of my meager earnings to subsidize them.
(4) There's not really much point in sending the workers back to work on slowdown. With the workers deliberately slowed to a crawl, the cargo ships would still be stacked up outside the ports, which is why the government is getting involved in the first place. They would of course be moving faster than they are when the ports are shut down, but not all that much faster -- slowdowns can cost as much as 2/3 of productivity, and union labor is often pretty damn unproductive to start with. My old company used to compete with one of the electrical unions here for business laying network cables, and the union guys took easily 2-3 times as long as our guys to complete the same work.
The government intervened not because the PMA is so darned cute, but because it's costing the economy close to $1 billion a day. Cutting that number to, say, $660 million is hardly sufficient.
(5) The union side in this is just unattractive. They're not fighting for living wages, or safer working conditions -- they're fighting to make sure that the ports remain unproductive always and forever. I have some sympathy for the guys in their 50's who don't know how to do anything else. But it's simply ridiculous to argue that we should keep bringing on new, younger workers to do drone jobs that can be done better, cheaper, and faster by machines. Replacing human muscle with technology is, by and large, how an economy grows.
[But don't we, as a society, have to find something to do for people who don't have the skills and intelligence to get good skilled jos? -- ed. Yes, but we can find something better for them to do than gumming up the works in one of the linchpin supply points for our economy.]
(6) What Scalia proposed was not really much of a temporary solution -- a 30-day contract extension would have allowed the slowdown to continue, or at least that's how it works here. It's a temporary solution from the standpoint of the unions, whose members are getting paid. From the point of view of the companies it solves nothing -- they're still hemorrhaging cash, and the requirements of the unions are such that in order to get a contract, they have to agree to terms which just mean they'll bleed to death more slowly.
(7) That said, I don't see how you require union workers to work to speed. If they want to slow things down, they will. Are you really going to put someone in jail for "accidentally" fouling a crane line and taking it out of commission for a day, or any of the other million and a half ways I can think of to slow things down?
(8) All of this just validates basic economic precepts. The government stepped in to set a floor -- a damn high one! -- on the price of certain labor. With the price artificially high, demand for that labor melted away. "Living Wage" proponents, take note. See that Kleiman (whose blog I adore, by the way) is reduced to essentially arguing that the company should be forced to continue to employing these workers, even though it makes the companies uncompetitive and, in this case, would actually cost them more money to employ each worker than each worker produced in revenue. You cannot run an economy that way. Ask anyone from the former Soviet Union if you don't believe me.
[Are you calling Kleiman a Communist? -- ed. No, silly. But many general beliefs, "support for unions" among them, lead their proponents through an interesting logical process. As each well-meant regulation has it's predictable result, they try to patch the "loophole" with another regulation, which results in something else they don't like, until we arrive at "companies should be forced to employ these workers even if it hurts their business to do so" -- something that I think it's hard to dispute that complying with the union's demands would do. Not just lower their profits, I mean; actually worsen their competitive position considerably. While most people who arrive at such a pass would never state such a principle a priori -- "Companies should employ workers who produce less than they're paid" -- they end up making such statements in defense of the first principle. You can see a similar phenomenon at work in otherwise reasonable pro-lifers who support shooting abortion doctors.]
While there's a certain part of me that revels in the glorious struggle of the unions in the 20's and 30's, I think trying to maintain a unionized workforce in 21st century America is a losing battle. Unions are rigid, combative, and fiercely protective of their turf, the exact opposite of what makes our economy so effective. They made perfect sense when people were just more dexterous horses, as in coal mines, or cheaper machines, as in assembly-line workers. But our technology has made that model outdated, not merely because we can replace workers, but because we can make them so much more productive, if only the unions will allow it. And in fact, high-paid unions only hasten the demise of their worker's jobs, since their wages make machinery much more attractive -- witness the demise of the typesetter's union for a perfect example of this. Unions also, because of their perfectly understandable desire to have as many members as possible paying them dues, wage constant war to make each worker as unproductive as possible, which hurts not just the companies in question, but the economies as a whole. I find it hard to see a compelling state interest in encouraging this.
I just saw the ad that the Republican in Montana is complaining was an attempt by the Dems to imply that he's gay. Normally I'm suspicious of such claims, and to be honest, I think the guy should be pre-emptively impeached for the leisure suit they show him wearing, but ultimately I have to agree; it reeks homophobic to me. The footage in question has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the ad, which purports to be about something he did wrong while he was the proprietor of a beauty school 20 years ago. Not that the ad dwells on whatever it was he did, because too much chatter would distract from the footage of a younger, hipper Senate candidate massaging another man's face and applying powder with a pink powder puff. They couldn't have made their message any clearer without, say, a shockwave of him prancing around in a maribou robe, singing excerpts from Judy Garland's greatest hits while waving a sign that says "Queer as a $3 bill!"
Just what Montana needs -- another event to build their sterling reputation on homosexuality.
And where are the Democrats? Has anyone on the left come out to say that trying to win a campaign by underhandedly implying that your candidate is homosexual is, y'know, wrong? I mean, I know that political campaigns often take on aspects of an eighth grade popularity contest. But we don't have to encourage it, dammit.
At the very least, I think the state Republicans should be allowed to give the state Democratic leadership an enormous wedgie.
All the left-siders who have been arguing that of course, if the shoe was on the other foot, they would be thrilled to allow the Republicans to sub in a more popular candidate, and the right-siders who have been arguing that of course, if the shoe was on the other foot, they would insist that their party stick to the rules, are going to get the chance to put their money where their mouth is.
Sounds like the Republican candidate in Montana who was trailing badly has just decided to drop out of the race amid accusations that the Democrats ran a homophobic ad against him.
Who will be the first Democrat to step up and say that of course this is totally different, and the Republicans can't be allowed to stick in, say, Montana's popular Republican governor, at the last minute?
Michael Tinkler points out that American students are heading to Canada for the cheapie education.
This makes me think, of course, of prescription drugs.
Now, whatever you think the reason is, it's obvious that prescription drugs cost less in Canada than in the US. It is also obvious that this is not an equilibrium unless you can keep consumers in the higher priced country from shopping in the lower priced country.
With prescription drugs, it's not obvious where that equilibrium is going to shake out -- whether our prices will fall to Canadian levels, or theirs will rise, or they'll meet in the middle.
But I am interested in education. Canadian taxpayers are essentially providing us an enormous subsidy. Not only do they ship large numbers of their educated people here; now it appears they're also educating our children at a steep discount. They can rectify the latter by refusing our money. . . but how do they rectify the former? Will NAFTA spell the end of low-cost education in Canada?
As an addendum to the previous post, I should say that I am very, very sympathetic to those who fear that America is turning into an empire. I share those fears. But I also don't think that merely invading Iraq makes it inevitable. We have done lots of things in our past that violated the grand isolationism at the heart of the American spirit. Our very first military action abroad was, essentially, an imperialist war against a weaker nation that was harboring terrorists, in pursuit of naked economic interest: the invasion of Tripoli, where the Barbary Pirates were succored.
Nor is violating civil liberties in wartime new. Democrats, take note: your hero, FDR, not only held military tribunals, but when he was unable to make a case in court against people he thought were a threat to national security, he had them committed to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital for the duration of the war.
Yet, Thomas Szasz and Noam Chomsky aside, we do not make a habit of either practice. And neither resulted in the breakdown of American society, possibly because there is no Barbary Pirates Studies program at Yale.
I think that these things should be subjected to national debate. And they should be undertaken with the knowlege that they are not our ideal, but an imperfect action in an imperfect world. And our resolve to make things better where we can, so that such things do not need to happen any more. But while I am cognizant of the slippery slope, I think it's silly to say that every less-than-ideal action is a nail in the coffin of liberty.
Nuclear Deterrence Part V: Wherein I Wrap It All Up and You Worship Me as a Living God
Warning! Looooong Post on Defense Policy written by Non-Defense-Expert
In Part I, we discussed how MAD closes off potential areas of escalation. In Part II, we discussed the principle of overwhelming force. In Part III, we discussed the importance of presenting a credible threat. In Part IV, we talked about why non-proliferation is crucial. Now I'll try to wrap it all up and show you overall why this makes me so unconvinced by the anti-war arguments I've heard.
Those of you who listen to Good Morning Scotland on Radio Scotland, which is, I presume, none of you, actually heard me debating the war the other day. The chap I was debating with was well meaning, well informed, but he was doing exactly what the majority of anti-war commenters I've seen do: pissing all over other people's arguments without actually offering any concrete proposals of his own.
One of my favorite b-school professors, in whom I took a class on technology business models, had a great line he got from his grandmother: "If all you've got is 'no', go peddle it somewhere else. We're full up here." By which he meant that it is easy for us to sit in a clean white room with 60 other students and make fun of other peoples' business plans. There is no plan so outstanding that someone cannot come up with a criticism; no model so compelling that someone cannot demonstrate a circumstance in which it will not work. The world is littered with businesses that wiser heads were convinced could not succeed: Nike, FedEx, and Coca-Cola, just to name three off the top of my head.
It is fine to pick holes in what other people are saying. That is the strength of the liberal system of debate. But in the end, if you do not like someone else's plan, you have to do more than come up with 3 zillion reasons it won't work. You have to come up with ways to make it better, stronger, faster, or you have to offer a plan of your own. And the anti-war side isn't really doing this.
Easiest to make fun of are those -- and there are more than a few of 'em -- who are incoherent. They just don't like the US government, they particularly don't like the Republicans, and they hate George Bush with a passion seldom found in one so young. They do not believe anything they hear from government sources, but they accept uncritically whatever Noam Chomsky says. There's no point in talking to them, first because their logical, mathematical, military, and historical education is so deficient that one would have to send them to class for a few years before we could have a meaningful argument, and second, because this debate for them is religious in nature. They are no more interested in actually finding out what range of possibilities is likely to work than a Carmelite nun is in trying to figure out how the Apostles might have faked Jesus' death.
Second easiest to make fun of are the people who want to spend the next ten years having questions and concerns. It is perfectly valid to have these things, of course; I've got loads of them myself. But in many cases the questioning is a substitute for any attempt to obtain answers. The chap I was debating ended up, after the interview was finished, debating the occupants of the bar we were at. He had lots of questions about why we were doing this, and how our foreign policy had failed, and what have you. And one guy looked at him, after fifteen minutes or so, and said, as I should have: "That's fine. But what would you do?"
Somewhat taken aback, he said "Well, I'd first like to look at the ways in which we created this mess with our foreign policy --"
At which point his interlocutor cut him off. "Great. Let's look. But what would you do?"
He had no answer. And this segment of the anti-war brigade doesn't. They don't have any plan for containing Iraq, keeping Saddaam from getting nukes, protecting our interests in the region, protecting Saddaam's neighbors. . . all they have is questions. Questions are necessary. I too, would like to know in what ways our foreign policy went wrong, so we can hopefully avoid those mistakes in the future. But at the end of the day, whatever we did or did not do, we have to resolve the situation as it exists now. Only if this group gets their way, we'll be far too busy gazing at our own navels to ever actually act.
Slightly less risible are the merely ignorant. They don't understand a large segment of the debate, and don't know that they don't understand it. Take, for example, the isolationists: let's walk off and leave the Gulf to its own devices. These come in two flavors: the right-wingers of various flavors from anarcho-capitalist to Pat Buchanan, who think that things will somehow work themselves out satisfactorily without our guming things up, and the left wing "No blood for oil" crowd. It's a compelling slogan, or at least I thought so when it was first released, in 1991. Of course, I was 17 then, and I also thought Sting was deep.
Both groups are either ignorant of, or deliberately ignoring, the realities of a complex modern industrial economy. They are not confronting what would actually happen if, for example, the oil supply were to contract by 10%.
Answer: the price of oil has a very, very tight inverse correlation with our GDP, which is to say that a percentage drop in the price of oil produces a corresponding percentage rise in GDP. So try this excercise. Look around you at all the stuff that is made with petroleum derivatives. You can start with all the plastic, many of the synthetic materials, much of the rubber, many of the drugs you take.
Now take 10% of them out of your house and throw them away. You don't get to use them any more.
Take 10% of the gas out of your car. Hope you like carpooling.
Turn your thermostat down; you'll be using 10% less heating oil this winter.
Remember when I said to take 10% of the plastic things and throw them away? Now take 10% of all the remaining stuff that isn't manufactured locally and throw it away too. We'll be using 10% fewer trucks from now on.
You can also take 10% of your salary and give it back, because using 10% less oil is going to make you 10% less productive, on average. It'll be better in some industries, like grocery clerking, and worse in others, like truck driving. But 10% is a good starting average. Just keep in mind that your mortgage, your groceries, and your kid's clothes aren't going to get any 10% cheaper.
And actually, I'm underestimating. Because the inverse correlation becomes less advantageous the bigger the cut. Which is to say that if we cut 1% of our oil consumption, our economy works around it. But when we cut 20%, things start grinding to a screeching halt. A good metaphor is to imagine that you decide to put less motor oil in your car. 1% less, you probably won't notice. 20% less and . . . hello, Mr. Repairman, will you give me an estimate or shall I just hand over my firstborn now?
Is it unrealistic to think that Saddaam, if allowed to control of over 50% of the world's proven oil reserves, would cut world supply by 10%? I'm not an energy expert, but I suspect it's all too realistic. There are only three large oil producing countries that are not currently pumping most of their proven capacity: Russia, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, which underproduces in order to make up for the other OPEC nations who cheat.
[Multilateralists here might want to note that Russia has strong financial incentive to leave Saddaam in place. If he does manage to invade Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, etc., and cuts supply in order to maximize his profit, Russia will make out like a bandit.]
It is well known in economics that monopolists maximize profit at a higher price, and lower volume, than a competitive market. Demand for oil is so very inelastic that I suspect that 10% is well within the possible range -- especially since unlike the Saudi Royal family, Saddaam will be looking to maximize short term revenue that accrues during his lifetime, rather than long term profits.
We had a 10% contraction in GDP once. You may have heard your grandparents speak of it: the Great Depression.
We cannot have a high-functioning industrial economy if the key commodities that fuel it are produced in regions wracked by terminal instability. Now, if you are willing to accept the economic consequences, I can accept that, but not if you are denying them. And acceptance means accepting, too, that it is the poor and the children who will suffer most. The rich haven't really gotten richer, in any meaningful sense, this century: Bill Gates has neater gadgets, but his standard of living isn't really much better than John D. Rockefeller's -- except on measures that you and I also share, like better health care and transportation. Bill Gates' life isn't going to suffer because our GDP is 8 trillion instead of 10 -- how many billions can he spend? The single mother waitress is the one who will notice because we can't afford new shoes for Junior this year.
While we are noting the stupid arguments category, let us not forget the "Why Now?" crowd. I don't want to hear this argument unless you have some actual reason that you think it will be better to invade Iraq in two years instead of today.
But I will answer it anyway. The answer is that before 9/11, we were a different country. We believed in largely reactive warfare. The problem with this argument is that while it is possibly appropriate to conventional warfare, it is simply inappropriate when applied to WMD or terrorism.
The only even vaguely coherent people making this argument want to wait for solid proof. Well, in a conventional world, you can see the threats coming to some extent. If those perfidious Canadians are massing on the border for an invasion, the folks in Maine are going to notice something's up. What sort of proof would you like that Saddaam is close to getting a nuclear bomb that is not:
1) Saddaam announcing that he has a nuclear bomb and telling US forces in the region to get the hell out of Dodge. 2) Classified intelligence information.
I mean, let's face it, we have to trust the government to some extent, because the information is asymmetrical, and it has to be. The price of maintaining an open society that welcomes people from around the world is that we can't tell everyone everything, because some of it would get back to our enemies. The problem with demanding intelligence information is that if we keep it non-specific, the government could say anything they want. They can tell us they have photographic proof that Saddaam is even now plotting to stage a Kathy Lee Gifford Christmas Spectacular, and how can we say any different until the horror is unleashed on the world? On the other hand, if they give us the kind of specific information that would make us believe them, we have also given Saddaam a chance to find out
a) What we know b) How we know it.
If Bush tells us information gleaned from a meeting that only eight generals attended, well, tomorrow Saddaam will have eight fewer generals, and we'll have one less intelligence source. This is not a recipe for victory.
No, we're going to have to trust him, for now -- with the caveat that there will be hell to pay if they lie to us. But here's the other thing: I have yet to meet one person who wants to wait for more information who is also willing to put a substantial sum of their own cash down on the bet that if we invade we will find nothing in Saddaam's archives that silences the majority of those criticizing the invasion.
(For the record, I'm not making that bet, but only because I can't figure out how to quantify it. And because everyone to whom I've put the proposition has hedged like a husband with lipstick on his collar.)
There are those like Tom Daschle who would be for the war if only a Democrat were getting the credit. I don't blame them, exactly, but it's hard to take it seriously, either.
Then there are my favorites: the inchoate "But nothing's happened yet" folks. By that logic, someone who has jumped out the window and is now hurtling past the 15th floor is perfectly all right.
Finally, we have those drawing ill-informed lessons from history. It's certainly true that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or else why do we keep having Love Boat Reunion shows? But it's also true that those who spend all their time looking at the past let the future slip through their fingers.
The fact that conventional deterrence has worked on Saddaam is irrelevant. Conventional deterrence is ineffective against nuclear threats, and against terrorism, for reasons that I hope I've shown here. Ask yourself this: if Saddaam gets a nuke, do you think that things in the Middle East are going to stay the same, or is the map going to get redrawn? C'mon, be honest -- there's no one listening. Just in your deepest heart of hearts. Can you really convince yourself that when Saddaam has amassed say, 10 atomic bombs, he's going to say "Well that's all right then" and store them in a secret basement just so he can go down and pet 'em once n a while?
The fact that non-proliferation wasn't irreparably destroyed when Israel got a Bomb does not mean that it will therefore be okay if 40 other nations get them. Go read the Tipping Point. Then say to yourself: if Saddaam gets a nuke, so will all his neighbors. Then get out your tap shoes and try to explain why that is a healthier, more stable situation than us invading now.
That's why those who want to leave things just as they are are so maddening: things aren't going to stay the way they are no matter what we do. We can control the change, or we can let Saddaam control it. But we can't all just put on our Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirts, fire up some Pepsi Clear, and declare that henceforth, it will always and forever be 1995.
The fact that MAD worked on the Soviet Union is likewise irrelevant. MAD was a very carefully constructed structure, one that fails if the integrity of any of its pillars is breached. Those who were carping on tangential issues in the comments of this series of posts completely missed the point, which is that there is no way to produce a workable system that has the stability and effectiveness of the system that guided us to the successful conclusion of the Cold War. Unless you have an architecture that reproduces the critical elements of MAD to contain Iraq, it's completely pointless for us to argue about the precise kill range of the weapons Saddaam is likely to obtain, or the probability of missile deployment. There are many ways to deploy and use nuclear weapons; any containment system has to address them all. If you think you can work out a containment system where all the defense wonks have failed, have at it. But it had better be more compelling than "It worked before", and it has to operate on something other than your belief that you can read Saddaam Hussein's mind.
There are people who are weighing the costs and benefits carefully, and because they're weighting the risks of action more highly than inaction, they wish to stay our hand. But I'll tell you what I've noticed: the defense and intelligence folks for the Clinton administration aren't among them. They're asking questions, intelligent questions. But they aren't advising us to stay our hand en masse. That, more than anything else, convinces me that the argument in favor of action is probably pretty solid, and that it was politics, rather than policy, that kept Clinton from pursuing Saddaam more aggressively.
So if you want to convince me that we shouldn't go to war, you have to convince me that you have a system that will work better than war. That I am wrong in my belief that inspections won't work. (That's an awfully tough sell; no one I've seen is even seriously arguing this point any more.) Or that you have a defense framework that is going to provide for security and stability at home and in the Middle East.
Just don't ask me any more questions unless you've got some answers.
I've just discovered this column by Ron Rosenbaum, a self described "libertarian liberal Democrat", with whose politics I probably do not agree, but whose integrity, at least as it is presented in this piece, is admirable.
How do you not notice that you are obese? We at Live from the WTC are well aware how the pounds can creep up on one. . . post 9-11 stress, combined with an unusually sedentary lifestyle brought on by the inevitable respiratory effects of working at Ground Zero, and an unusually level high sugar consumption brought on by the kindness of the Salvation Army, rendered us temporarily horrified at our weight until we could get back into the gym. Obese, however, is not something that happens overnight. It is also not something that happens invisibly. After you've pushed through a couple of dress sizes, don't you notice something? Such as the fact that you can no longer view your feet without a mirror?
For one, long, soul-wrenching, gut-searing, but-VodkaP-where-will-I-go-what-will-I-do week, he's been silent. Now he's back, with outstanding posts like this one that remind us just what it was we were missing all this time:
A very wise man once said that if we throw away our freedom, if we renounce our heritage, there can never be another America. Never again on this planet will the political, geographical, and philosophical stars align they way they did in 1776. There are no new continents to find, explore, settle, and to which to escape all the bloody history of the Old World. This is it – humanity’s one shot at a new creation.
But we might just blow it if Washington can’t protect it.
Be afraid of George W. Bush if you must. But your real fear should be your neighbors, if Bush fails us in this Terror War. We’re just one more attack away from trading a lot of freedom for a little security – and getting the neither that we deserve.
With al Qaeda hurt and scurrying, our biggest danger now lies in Iraq. Iran’s government is rotten fruit, ready to fall on its own. North Korea is starving. Saudi Arabia exists at our whim. Syria is hapless. Libya is like Italy under Mussolini – loud but mostly laughable. Pakistan is worrisome, but mostly to itself, not to us. Only Iraq has the combination of means and menace to threaten us directly.
A nuclear-armed Saddam doesn’t actually have to level Los Angeles or New York to put National Guardsmen on every street corner. He doesn’t actually have to spray us with smallpox to bring our economy to a halt. He doesn’t actually have to lob Sarin missiles into Israel to blow apart our foreign policy.
Saddam only has to demonstrate that he can. Then we become a very fearful people again, much worse than we were on September 12.
Part of what makes America special is our simple physical separation from the Old World. We have no Kaiser on our northern border, rattling his sword. Our southern flank is poor Mexico, not expansionist China. Enemy warships don’t patrol our coasts, threatening our lives and livelihoods. Those simple facts accord us much of our freedom. 9/11 showed that none of those facts count like they once did. So now we must either police our threats, or police-state ourselves.
Most civil libertarians fear what will happen to us if we attack Saddam. I fear what will happen if we don’t.
I think that the New York Times is suggesting that we attack Turkey. Why? Because (I am not making this up) they're our biggest supporter in the Middle East.
I don't want to hear from anyone else telling me how the left are the masters of diplomacy, 'kay?
Left wing bloggers are predictably calling for the righties to retract their statements about the Democrats. I find, to my relief, that I did not make any statements about the Democrats, only about their arguments, which I still think are awful. Horatio, who made comments about the Democrats, but who also is a Democrat, declines as of this writing to issue a retraction.
Since I have called for no appellate action, I feel I'm allowed to explore the issue of whether or not they are in fact different things. I think so, actually.
First of all, the actual issue in the earlier case was whether Forrester's name could be moved, not whether he was on the ballot. Apparently, in New Jersey, the annointed party nominee occupies the top spot. The previous occupant of this slot had resigned over a scandal after the deadline for changing the ballot in the primary, which just goes to show, say some correspondants, that the Democrats haven't had an original thought in years.
Now, you can argue that this is mere quibbling: that the real question is the rule of law. And I have some sypathy to this position. I think you could also argue, however, that the latter violates the intent of the law, while the former doesn't.
Again let's ask why the laws specify a deadline? To ensure that the ballots are printed and distributed, and presumably to ensure that people have time to educate themselves about the candidates, and that the candidates are given a fair shot at the race. Clearly, there was time for the ballots to be printed and distributed, because they were. So let's look at the latter two issues. This has some traction with Lautenberg/Torricelli, but Forrester was in the race already. The only thing that changed was the materially important fact that he was the party's candidate, a fact that is conveyed to New Jersey voters via their ballot. It would be nice if the primaries got a ton of coverage and we knew about all the minor candidates, but in a heavily Democratic state whose constituents are serviced by the media markets of two major cities, this is unfortunately not true. The voters were not being denied a chance to educate themselves about the contestant; he was already in the race.
What about the candidates? Do they have any legally allowable interest in all this? Let's face it: Lautenberg's switch has materially harmed Forrester's campaign, and not just because "he doesn't get to run unopposed". He has spent a lot of money running against a candidate who is not in the race any longer: research, ads, focus groups, polls, etc. For the piddling sum of $800,000, the Democrats just arranged for Forrester to waste more than half his campaign funds. I notice the court has no interest in making him whole on that loss. And please don't give me any whine about how this is somehow uniquely Republican, because people can get seriously hurt laughing that hard.
Of course, you could argue the same thing about the woman who sued to stop Forrester's name from being moved. But it's hard to see how she was actually harmed. If they didn't change the ballots, it's probable that the guy who resigned would have won anyway, or so it seems to me from my limited experience in following primary elections. At which point the party would have nominated someone to replace him: Doug Forrester. Which is not true in the same way of Torricelli/Lautenberg; the Democrats don't want to buy themselves a year's time, but to win the Senate seat for another 6 years. The only way they can do that is by running a different candidate.
It's certainly possible to argue that this is all pilpul. And since I've been telling the Republicans to drop it all along, none of it changes my basic opinion. But I do think there's an argument to be made that the cases are materially, as well as technically, different.
